


It Matters

by saintsrow2



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Coming Out, Eddie is gay and out AU, Fix-It, Gay Pride, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Internalised Ho, M/M, Post-Canon, accidentally seasonal fic?, heavy on the comfort, ok i meant to say internalised homophobia but internalised ho is too funny to delete, that's eddie. the internalised ho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:13:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28371444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saintsrow2/pseuds/saintsrow2
Summary: “So, wait, Eddie, you got married?”“Yeah, why’s that so fucking funny, dickwad?”“What, to like, a woman?”“No,” Eddie says, unapologetic. “His name is Clive.”-Richie thought he was the only gay person in the Losers Club. So did Eddie.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 69
Kudos: 740





	It Matters

**Author's Note:**

> The idea of "what if Eddie was married to a man not a woman?" has been thrown around forever by roughly a million people, but for some reason it was right now that the idea of writing one hit me. 
> 
> Shout out to Ezra for editing and proofreading I love you x

“So, wait, Eddie, you got married?”

“Yeah, why’s that so fucking funny, dickwad?”

“What, to like, a woman?”

“No,” Eddie says, unapologetic. “His name is Clive.”

“Oh,” Richie says. The big, cartoonish  _ I’m going to wind you up and watch you go  _ expression that defines every memory Eddie has of him vanishes. It is replaced by a horrible stillness.

“New York passed the Marriage Equality Act in 2011,” Eddie says. “You might have heard about it.”

“Yeah,” Richie says. 

When Eddie was twenty, freshly out to his college friends, he had been encouraged by them all to come out to his mother. He had not been excited about the prospect, but was told repeatedly, most fervently, that afterwards he would feel free. He would finally be able to start living his life as himself, and he would be unburdened by the stress of having to hide from his loved ones. It had been an alluring idea, the concept of fully possessing his own identity. So he had told his mother, convinced by his friends and hoping that it would give him the final burst of confidence he needed to talk to the tall, handsome skater-type who was in his ethics class.

His mother had wept furiously.

“What happened to you? What made you this way?” She would demand over the course of that Christmas break, trapped in the small walkup apartment she had lived in for as long as Eddie could remember, that was the backdrop of all the teenage memories he possessed, the one he had fled to go live in cramped student accommodation, treasuring the freedom of his own lodgings even while his anxiety about communal living chewed away at his nerves. 

The causes of Eddie’s homosexuality his mother suggested that miserable winter of 1996 were first and foremost that he had grown up without a father, then that he had never had a girlfriend, some nebulous ‘sickness’, liberals infesting NYU, superhero comics having too many shirtless men, his fear that he wasn’t ‘enough of a man’ because he ‘was too weak’, vaccines, sports, Star Wars, the decline of standards amongst women, feminism, him trying to punish her, bad diet, and the fact he had never had any friends as a child. Eddie went back to college early and spent New Year's Eve alone in his dorm having a panic attack. He wished he never told her and did not change his mind about that at any point before she died, ten years later, another event in his life that he assumed would free him and fill him with confidence and instead left him sitting alone in his apartment without any idea what he was supposed to do next.

What Eddie discovered after that was that you do not ‘come out’ once in your life. You come out, in little ways, almost every day for the rest of your life. You come out to your family, your friends, your boss, your coworkers. You come out to your neighbours. You come out to your trainer at the gym. You come out to a taxi driver. You come out to the person checking you out at Whole Foods when you have to mention you need a minute, your boyfriend is getting some almond milk. You come out forever, the tiny daily risks. The only difference was at some point it became easy.

Eddie thought, at nearly forty, having been married for five years and in a relationship for eight, he would not care about coming out. That he was used to every kind of response, from the supportive, to the clueless, embarrassing ally, to overt disgust, and nothing could surprise him anymore. When Richie’s face goes briefly lax with shock Eddie is suddenly transported back to being twenty, standing in his front room while his mother sobbed and begged him to find a doctor who would say ‘the right things’ if all the other ones didn’t think being gay was something that could be fixed, and he realises that there is a gulf of difference between coming out to people who don’t matter and to the people who do. The look in Richie’s eyes, Eddie is sure, is embarrassment, and something in Eddie’s chest hurts in a way he hasn’t felt in a long time.

He remembers in the odd way that he has started to remember things, sudden bursts of revelation like guessing the right answer in the puzzle that is  _ who is Eddie Kaspbrak?,  _ the games of homophobia chicken they had played as preteens. Eddie understands now that his childhood fear and fascination around being gay was because he  _ was _ gay, that peeking out at homosexuality through the cracks between his fingers had been the beginning of his child mind starting to wrestle with his own identity. He also knows that this is not true for all of the Losers. That for some of them, the ignorant, childhood homophobia they had shown had been just that. Homophobia. And he does not know them well enough now to say for sure that it isn’t something that lasts. 

“Alright, what about you, Trashmouth? You married?” Bill says. Either he doesn’t see the tension or he’s intentionally wiping it away, but there’s relief when it’s broken. Those few seconds of panicked thought that flashed through his mind 

“Oh, there’s no  _ way _ Richie’s married,” Bev says. 

Eddie thinks, probably, that she is right. There’s no ring on Richie’s hand and aside from that it’s so hard to imagine him being tied down, having a woman he goes home to every night. Eddie has watched his standup, Youtube clips he watched on the plane, almost furious about the fact he had never before put the pieces together that the reason this random stand-up comedian kept catching his eye whenever he scrolled past the special on Netflix, the reason he always got the same uncomfortable shiver in his spine that made him never want to watch anything Richie was in, was because his brain was trying to stop him from finding the truth and exploding into a million traumatised fractals. He had not enjoyed the stand-up. It was immature and shallow and based in the kind of reality that sitcoms took place in, the ones where beleaguered, hypersexual men were plagued by irrational women who offended with their needs, who were expected to coddle and mother but ask nothing of men they provided sexual service to. Eddie hated that shit and didn’t like it any more when it came out of Richie’s mouth. He hoped to whatever loving God was out there that there wasn’t a woman at home having to hear what Richie really thought of her.

“No, I got married,” Richie says in protest and Eddie’s heart does somersaults. 

“Richie, I don’t believe it,” Beverly says.

“When?” Eddie demands. 

“You didn’t hear this?” Richie says, disbelief creeping into his own voice. Was this public news? Richie is a celebrity, when celebrities get married there’s stories about it. Eddie found news about Bill getting married within seconds of googling his name. 

“No.”

“You didn’t know I got married?” Is he hurt? He didn’t know Eddie was gay. He didn’t know Eddie  _ existed _ until a day ago.

“No.”

“Yeah, no. Me and your mom are very, very happy right now.”

The table explodes into laughter and Eddie thinks, in that mixture of love and rage that accompanies almost all of his thoughts surrounding Richie, that Richie has not changed at all. 

He isn’t sure if that’s good or bad.

They go to the Derry Townhouse to get a few hours of sleep before their lives are plunged into total fucking chaos. It is eerily quiet; Richie wonders if the staff, who vanish after 9pm and are deeply reluctant to speak to any of the occupants, are more scared of him than he is of them or if they’ve been replaced by Pennywise. Either way, he finds himself alone in the bar after the others have gone to bed at around midnight. He helps himself to another drink. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to sleep without it.

“Put it on my tab,” he says in his best Humphrey Bogart. 

“Put what on your tab?”

Richie startles and looks up at the doorway, where Eddie is standing. Eddie has stripped down to his blue polo and slacks and Richie swallows, not letting his eyes linger on the defined muscle of Eddie’s biceps or his neat, small waist. How did he grow up to be so Richie’s  _ type? _ What a cruel joke. Then again, maybe rude little men with nice arms are Richie’s type  _ because  _ Eddie was lodged in the back of his mind like a splinter. He shakes his head. He hates armchair diagnosis. 

“The whiskey,” Richie says. “Want some?”

“Uh, no, I think I drank more at the Jade than I have since I was in college,” Eddie says. 

“Makes sense you’d grow up to be a lightweight. Remember when you drank two beers and puked at Bill’s sixteenth birthday party?” Richie says.

“Yeah, I seem to remember you  _ also  _ hurled, Trashmouth. Pukemouth.”

“It was sympathy vomit, I have a delicate constitution.”

“Very delicate, nothing to do with you eating your own bodyweight in that fucking awful pizza we got from Luigi’s. They got any seltzer?”

Eddie comes over to sit at the stool in front of the bar and Richie shifts immediately into bartender mode, as if possessed by the character rising up from the floorboards. He grabs a glass from the shelf behind him and flips it in the air, catching it with a hand behind his back before twirling around, filling it with seltzer from the tap and then sliding it across the bartop to Eddie, who looks legitimately impressed.

“That’ll be $25,” Richie says. “New York prices.”

“How did you do that?” Eddie says, with a smile. He is infuriatingly handsome, downright  _ offensively  _ so. He’d be even more handsome if his hair wasn’t slicked back to his skull quite so tightly and maybe he smiled at Richie a little more… Without even consciously thinking of it, Richie knows he would do anything to make Eddie smile.

“I got cast as a bartender on a TV sitcom couple of years back,” Richie says. “Took a bunch of classes so I could pour drinks and look like I knew what I was doing. We only filmed the pilot, though, no one wanted to pick it up.”

“That sucks.”

“Eh, it’s fine. The show wasn’t that great. I don’t know if I want to get stuck doing acting anyway, I like touring too much. All those contracts tying me down, I’d go stir crazy.” 

In truth he  _ had  _ been upset the show hadn’t been picked up. It was only afterwards that he was able to convince himself he hadn’t wanted it anyway, and he hadn’t tried out for another show since, not as a lead. His friend who had written the pilot had been hurt that he’d said no to his next project. To him, Richie’s sudden decision he didn’t want any recurring roles felt like an almost inexplicable change in mood. Richie has never tried to explain to him how the rejection had pushed him into a depressive slump for weeks, one that he didn’t want to revisit any time soon. 

“You like touring? I think  _ I’d  _ go crazy, having to travel all the time. All those planes and hotel rooms.” Eddie shudders before he takes a sip of the water. 

“No, I love it,” Richie says with some enthusiasm. “You get to see so many different places and hang out with so many people. One time in Louisiana I met up with these guys at a bar afterwards and they took me back to this guy’s house to see his like, gator rescue. Another time I ended up at a bar with these like, twenty year old girls and they knew about this  _ crazy _ secret club in Austin where there was this  _ huge  _ art piece that looked like a mechanical dinosaur…”

He does love touring. He loves standing in front of a crowd that will applaud him and cheer. He loves the feedback and the easy love of people who are already fans and prepared to have a good time. 

Eddie is smiling again, and insanely, Richie thinks there is something admiring in it.

“I couldn’t do it,” Eddie says, a little wistful. “I’d get too stressed. And lonely, too.”

“You never get lonely on tour,” Richie lies. “There’s always people around.”

He does get lonely on tour, but he’s lonely at home too, so it doesn’t feel like a significant difference. At least on tour people love him, the brief hot flash of love that is fan appreciation, the sound of the applause. It sustains him, much the same way a starving man could chew wood to trick his stomach into thinking he was eating. 

“You could come with me sometime,” he says, impulsively. “After we get out of here.”

“Oh, yeah?” Eddie says. His eyes are warmer than the whisky Richie is drinking.

“Yeah. We could find some crazy shit together.”

As soon as he says it he knows how badly he wants it. He’s suddenly thirteen again, joking  _ wouldn’t it be weird if we played spin the bottle? What if you dared me to kiss you? Wouldn’t that be so fucking crazy? _ He tries to hide how much he’s longing for Eddie to say yes, as if it’s a physical thing written all over his face. Richie has always felt like he wants too loudly, too intensely, for normal people. 

“Mm, well, I probably lost my job since I left so suddenly, I might as well have a midlife crisis and travel America with a standup comic.” When Eddie smiles, he has dimples. Richie feels downright sick to his stomach. 

“Yeah?” Richie says, knowing full well he’ll settle for ‘might as well’. 

“Yeah, I think I could handle a little bit of travelling. Long as it isn’t long term, I have enough trouble going on business trips. I need to know I’ve got someone to go home to.” 

“Guess we can never get married then,” Richie says, absurdly. He immediately regrets it and sharply looks away from Eddie like Eddie is going to be able to see that Richie still has an adolescent crush on him. Eddie just forces a laugh.

“Good thing I’m already married,” he says.

Richie’s skin crawls. He shivers involuntarily.

“How did  _ that  _ happen?” He says, smiling with a few too many teeth. When he looks back at Eddie he expects to see the usual pissed-off look right when Eddie was about to take his bait and they were going to verbally wrestle with each other, but instead there is something apprehensive about Eddie’s face. 

“We’d been together for three years and thought getting married made sense,” Eddie says. “We agreed on it.”

“Oh, you mutually agreed. That’s romantic,” Richie says.

“I don’t like being forced to make big decisions spontaneously. Clive knows that.”

Richie knows that too. It’s why he knows how to wind Eddie up so well. 

No one else at dinner had questions about Eddie being gay. No one asked for a coming out story, no ‘when did you know?’, no ‘how did you not tell us when we were teenagers?’ Eddie didn’t make a big deal out of it so no one did, taking it in the same stride they did as learning he worked for an insurance firm, just another fact about Eddie. It had left Richie the only one chewing those questions over in his mind, desperately trying to find a way to sneak them into the conversation and coming up short.  _ When did you know _ kept playing in his mind like a bad song he couldn’t forget, but he never managed to say the words. Part of him doesn’t know if he  _ wants  _ to know; if he finds out they had both been gay and closeted and silent at sixteen, right before Eddie had moved away and when Richie’s yearning for him had felt so huge that he thought he was going to suffocate in his own skin, the revelation that they could have confided in each other might kill him. 

“I never thought…” Richie starts, and then stops.

“What?” Eddie says. Richie can see his hackles are up. “Never thought what?”

Richie tries to look for a way to retreat and comes up short.

“That you were gay.”

“Does it matter?” Eddie says.

“Of course it does,” Richie says. 

Eddie’s face is stiff. 

Part of Richie’s brain screams at him,  _ just tell him, tell him that you’re gay, tell him the truth,  _ but the words don’t form into sounds. It would be too much, ripping off the bandages too soon and exposing the wounds beneath. For once in his life, Trashmouth can’t speak.

“Ok,” Eddie says. “I have to go to bed.”

He leaves the rest of his drink behind. 

Sitting on the toilet in the bathroom attached to his room at 1:27 AM, smoking a cigarette and scrolling through his phone, Richie Tozier has decided that Clive Aldenberg, 41-year-old CFO of a business that sells luxury designer furniture, is his worst enemy in the fucking world. He now knows that Clive previously worked for a bank, then the financial department of an interior design company before making the lateral move into furniture, where he has remained for the last ten years. In his freetime he runs triathlons, paints, and bakes, which he posts about religiously on his instagram, though he hasn’t posted anything for almost two days, presumably because his husband is missing. He has two sisters and five nieces and nephews, his Facebook profile photo a picture of him and three of their identical, blond, smiling faces. He went to Cornell. He is also a self-proclaimed ‘social liberal, financial conservative’, which  _ really  _ pisses Richie off because it just means he wants to protect his own marriage while fucking every poor person in the country, but he did post about not liking Trump a month ago so at least probably votes Democrat. This is a relief to Richie only because it means Eddie has not gone unequivocally insane. 

Eddie.

Richie takes a drag on his cigarette and puts an elbow on his twitchy leg to try and stop it from jiggling quite so intensely against the bowl. Eddie Kaspbrak is gay. The minute he’d said it at dinner Richie had felt like he’d been hit by a truck. He had been simultaneously astounded, disappointed, and strangely annoyed, both with Eddie and himself.  _ Eddie’s fucking out and proud? Eddie had a way more fucked up childhood than you, Trashmouth, and he’s married and settled down, living the polite liberal gay dream. What’s your excuse? You’re a bad gay. You’re an embarrassment to good homosexuals everywhere.  _

What  _ is  _ Richie’s excuse, other than that the idea of dropping the bombshell of coming out makes him want to run and hide in a deep, deep hole? He finishes his cigarette and throws the butt into the sink. 

Having a secret can consume so much of your life. Richie probably thinks about being gay a thousand percent more than Eddie ever does, obsessively thinking about what he says and who he fucks and how he looks, if he might accidentally out himself by being at the wrong place with the wrong guy. Clive probably never thinks about any of that stuff. Clive has probably been out since he was a teenager and feels so supported and at ease with himself that he never bothers going to pride events because well, why would he celebrate it when it’s mundane and normal to him, that he gets to be out and married and happy?  _ I would be so much better at being out than you,  _ Richie thinks. __

But he’s not out. And that’s why someone else is married to Eddie and Richie is alone. He missed his chance. He wonders how much of his life he’s missed because he’s never been out. The void of unfulfilled possibility yawns in front of him. 

He goes down a rabbit hole trying to remember a joke from  _ The Simpsons _ (he eventually recalls it is “I sleep in a racecar bed, where do you sleep?” “I sleep in a big bed with my wife.”) and then on practicing his Homer impression, which is about fifteen years too late to be funny but has haunted him as something he can’t master since middle school. Eventually he walks out into the bedroom of the hotel and nearly has a heart attack when he sees Stan sitting on the bed. 

“Jesus Christ, Stanley, you trying to kill me before the clown gets to me?” Richie says, theatrically clutching his chest. Then he winces, not sure how much they can joke about death before it gets uncomfortable. 

Stan is unfazed. He has been frighteningly calm ever since he showed up late and freshly bandaged. Richie wonders if he’s on tranquilisers. Richie wonders if Stan would give him tranquilisers. 

“Do you have any weed?” Stan says.

“No,” Richie says, annoyed that this drug exchange is going the opposite way he had hoped. “I flew, how would I get weed on the plane?”

“You flew? You mean that red midlife crisis on wheels is a rental? You went into a rental place and asked for a Mustang?” 

“Did you come into my room in the middle of the night just to bully me before we all get eaten alive?” 

Stan shrugs. “I thought you were my best bet. I smoke when I’m stressed.”

“Oh you’re stressed? What’s up? Bad day at the office?” Richie goes and lies down on his bed next to Stan. “Your best bet is probably Mike. I don’t think I have the same connections I had in Derry anymore.”

“Sue Greenfield’s older brother is not  _ a connection.” _ Stan lay back on Richie’s bed. “Hm. I haven’t thought about Sue Greenfield in twenty years.”

Richie offers Stan a regular cigarette but apparently he got over his phase of rebellious teenage smoking before the age of forty and he rejects it. Richie looks at Stan and thinks about how he has not seen this man in twenty-five years and yet feels completely comfortable practically sharing a bed with him. He was always close with Stan; they would bicker always, but he had seen Stan cry and he had told Stan things he hadn’t told everyone else. Richie has always been a closed-off person when it came to what he really felt, but it was more acceptable to talk to Stan about feelings, somehow. You could trust Stan to take things seriously, when you wanted him to. Richie hopes that holds true.

“Stan,” Richie says. Stan is lying back against the headboard with his eyes closed, but he gives an almost imperceptible nod. “Do you… Remember… A conversation we once had, when we were sixteen, and we… It was at like, a football game against the team from…” 

“Are you asking me if I remember you telling me that you’re gay?” Stan says, cutting off Richie’s rambling.

“Yeah,” Richie says. “Guess that answers that.”

“I know you’re gay. I haven’t told anyone else.”

“Did you know Eddie was gay?”

“No.” One of Stan’s eyes opens. “Did you?”

“No,” Richie says.

Stan makes a small humming noise and bumps his shoulder against Richie’s. 

“You know now,” he says.

“I wish I knew before he had a fucking husband.”

Both of Stan’s eyes open. The smile he gives Richie is very sympathetic, which should feel comforting but really just makes the pit in the bottom of Richie’s stomach feel deeper and emptier.

“It’s going to be ok,” Stan says. 

Eddie gets stabbed, twice, once in the face and once in the side, narrowly missing his spine and many of his internal organs by millimeters only because Stan shouts for him to  _ move, Kaspbrak! _ This is more times than he has ever been stabbed in his entire life, and he has the absurd thought, as Richie and Ben cooperate to carry him out of the sewers, that he is making up for lost time. Cradled in Richie’s arms as they run out of the collapsing Neibolt House, he is sure Richie mumbles something to him in his ear, but it’s impossible to separate it from the dreams he is also fading in and out of, a jumble of memories and words and vivid hallucinations, himself and the others age forty and age thirteen, racing through the halls of Neibolt. He becomes, for a while, overwhelmed with the responsibility of making sure that his teenage self gets out of the front door unharmed. He keeps calling for thirteen year old him to run faster, convinced that he is trailing behind the heels of the other six Losers as they run for the exit, but little Eddie just keeps running and the hallway stretches on and on…

He wakes up two days later in a sudden flash like surfacing from deep waters and gasping for air, jerking into consciousness violently under the fluorescent lights of the hospital room. He lies in stunned silence for a second, vividly aware of his own body and how searingly bright it is in the room. His eyes feel like they’re going to fall out of his skull but he manages to roll them to the right and take in that Richie is asleep in a chair next to him, resting his head and arms on the bed. Richie’s back slowly rises and falls in sleep, face hidden behind his elbow. His eyelids are twitching as he dreams.

Eddie is sure they were talking about something important, but he no longer remembers what it was. This frustrates him; his inability to remember feels like a failure in his quest to have total mastery over his greatest enemy, his own body. Gingerly he reaches out and his fingertips brush over the ends of Richie’s curls, an animal part of him wanting to weave his fingers into his hair, to sooth Richie’s troubled sleep. 

“Hey,” Eddie croaks out.

Richie jumps and startles awake. He blinks a few times and then his face lights up like someone smashed a switch on. He lurches across the bed to hug Eddie, arms around his shoulders, hitting him hard enough to make Eddie yelp with pain.

“Watch it!” Eddie says.

“Thank fucking God,” Richie says not able to stop himself from letting out a sob. “Thank fucking God you’re ok.”

He presses his forehead against Eddie’s, breathing soft and gentle on his face.

“I don’t know what I would have done if you died,” he says, his voice hushed and full of awe, wonder that he lived in a world where Eddie Kaspbrak got to live and breathe. It makes Eddie’s heart thunder in his chest. He does not think anyone has ever been so grateful just to exist in the same place as him before. 

“Did we make it?” He says. 

“No, dumbass, we all died. What do you think?” Richie wipes a tear from his eye and Eddie politely pretends he didn’t see it. 

“I feel like I died,” Eddie says.

“Not on my watch.” 

Eddie doesn’t know where you begin thanking someone for saving your life. 

“Richie-” he says.

“Don’t,” Richie says. “You saved me first, right?”

Eddie realises he did, kind of. 

“Then we’re even, I guess.” 

Richie grins and it makes the part of Eddie that always wanted Richie’s approval soft. 

“Hey, when you were down there,” Richie says. “Did you hear me… Do you remember what I said?”

“What, when you called Pennywise a sloppy bitch? That’s pretty vivid.”

Richie is still smiling, but something has disappeared from it, Eddie can tell. 

“Nevermind,” Richie says. “Don’t worry about it, you’ve got enough to deal with.”

There’s no time left before the others appear and the two of them are no longer alone together. 

It isn’t clear if no one thought to call Clive, if no one had his number, or Clive couldn’t get out to Derry but whichever it is he’s the last to hear about the accident. Eddie would be annoyed with the others for not thinking to call him sooner, but the idea of calling him hasn’t crossed Eddie’s mind either, and when he bursts into the hospital room the afternoon after Eddie wakes up, they’re mutually shocked. Clive, shocked that his husband apparently nearly died and no one figured he needed to know, Eddie, that he has a husband at all. With all of the Losers around him he has forgotten that there was anyone else in the world that matters. All seven of them are occupying his hospital room at the moment Clive arrives, and the eight of them have a rare moment where there is a single shared thought amongst everyone in the room, and that thought is  _ who are you and why are you here?  _

“What the hell is going on?” Clive says.

_ Oh shit,  _ Eddie realises,  _ that’s my husband.  _

Half of the Losers have spouses. Bill, improbably, has famous actress Audra Phillips, and much like Eddie, has not mentioned her since he arrived, an omen of doom. Stan has Patty, who he has been frequently nursing phone calls from, holding his phone the way you might cup your hands around a baby bird. Beverly has Tom Rogan, a man whose name has exclusively been spoken in grave, bitter tones and who makes Bev’s hands curl reflexively into fists. Eddie has Clive. 

Clive is tall, blond and has an angular, polished look to him, like brass. The first time they met, at a mutual friend’s wedding in 2008, Eddie admired how clean cut and scrupulously detail-orientated he was. It was the kind of man that Eddie wanted to  _ be,  _ someone who was together, precise, organised. Clive, he has always said, keeps him on track; they have mutually lengthy grooming routines, intricate knowledge of their shared finances, detailed health plans. They tell each other everything. All the important stuff. Health. Work. They’re the most functional couple that Eddie knows; they have, at times, laughed about how they’re the opposite of the stereotypes about gay men. Steady relationship, steady jobs, a nice home together. It went against all the things Eddie’s mother said he’d never have. They were proud to not be like those gay stereotypes; the acceptable, nice face of gay integration. 

Seeing Clive in his hospital room, staring at his friends, Eddie feels embarrassed. He looks, instinctively, to Richie. Richie is sitting in one of the small chairs they have dragged into his room, one leg kicked over the arm, trying to force his large frame into it like a cat sitting in a box that’s too small. His eyes are fixed on Clive, and in the stillness of his face Eddie can see tension, muscles wound tight. He moves unexpectedly, dragging his legs back and sitting upright, retreating from the casual sprawl defensively. 

“Who are you?” Bill says, genuinely puzzled.

“His husband?!” Clive says, voice spiking in anger. “Who are  _ you?” _

“These are my…” Eddie tries to find a word that will encompass everything the Losers are to him. Family? Brothers in arms? Ka-tet? Fellow soldiers? Coven? “Friends.”

It feels like a poor substitute and a bad explanation. Clive glares at him. 

“Wh…” Clive’s head darts around the room like he’s looking for some kind of cheat card that will explain what’s going on and why the world, and his husband, have fallen into madness. He blinks. “Is that  _ Beverly Marsh?” _

Bev excuses herself and makes a break out into the hallway, Ben following. Clive watches them leave with an expression on his face like he thinks that he’s in a prank show and he’s waiting for the cameras to come out. He is practically begging Eddie for an explanation with the pale horror of his face, eyes bugging out of his skull. 

Mike is the one who gently encourages the others to leave, to give the two of them space, though Eddie suspects he is just uncomfortable with the stranger suddenly appearing in their space. Pinned in the bed, he helplessly claws at his bedsheets as he watches the others leave to the soundtrack of shoes squeaking on tile. All of them look troubled, with a particular guilt haunting Bill’s face that makes Eddie think he is finally thinking of his own wife, but a dark cloud has descended on Richie and he folds away into himself in a way that alarms Eddie.

When they are gone, Clive does not run to Eddie’s side but stays at the foot of the bed, still stricken with horror and alarm.

“What  _ happened?” _ He says. “Eddie, how could you let this happen to you?”

“It was important. I…” 

He realises that he absolutely cannot tell his husband about any of this. For the first time since he was a child, Eddie suddenly has things he needs to hide. 

The story, as unanimously decided by the Loser’s Club in order to explain away the multiple hospitalizations, police, and the insanity of dropping everything and going cross-country with no warning, goes as follows:

Following Stan’s failed suicide attempt he decided to return to his hometown to reunite with his old friends, who heroically dropped everything to come to the aid of a friend they hadn’t seen in years, their trauma at hearing about his near-miss making their decisions impulsive. While there, Mike and Eddie were assaulted by a former inmate who had forced them into the Neibolt House and then mysteriously vanished (his body would wash up in the Kenduskeag two weeks later, his death haphazardly ruled an accident by a coroner who assumes the head injury was caused by rocks on the river in a fall that killed him, and there would be no more questions). Inside the Neibolt House, the other Losers had come to Eddie and Mike’s rescue, only for the unusual amount of activity inside the building to cause it to collapse.

“It’s a stupider fucking story than one of Bill’s books,” Richie says later, after Clive has gone to a hotel in Derry to try and find a place to stay the night and it is just the seven of them huddled around Eddie’s bed, before visiting hours end. He is half-assing the joke, Eddie can tell, but Bill still gives him a tired look.

“It’ll hold up,” Stan says. “All seven of us are in agreement about what happened.”

“Your wife is never going to buy it,” Eddie says. He doesn't think Clive believed it, but he didn’t know what else to say. The idea of telling him the truth didn’t even occur to Eddie as an option, which makes Stan’s next assertion more surprising. 

“She doesn’t need to,” Stan says. “I’m going to tell her the truth.”

Eddie is astonished by this. Bill looks lost.

“I don’t know if I can do that…” Bill says. He hasn’t talked about his wife much lately, and his voice is faltering now.

“I’m not telling Tom anything,” Bev says. 

Richie looks at Eddie out of the corner of his eye. Eddie instinctively feels defensive; he could tell Clive the truth if he  _ wanted _ to, surely. This isn’t the same as with Beverly or Bill. He tries to open his mouth and protest that maybe he’ll tell Clive the truth one day, but the lie dies before it even reaches his lips. He realises that it doesn’t matter whether or not he  _ can _ tell Clive the truth. He just doesn’t want to. 

Eventually they all separate, by necessity. Bill has to leave for work, apologetic and grave-faced about leaving so soon. Stan leaves too, after his wife joins them to make sure he’s fine and stable to come back. Patty is intense and intelligent and talks incredibly quickly. She intimidates Eddie a little, in how confident she is in what she thinks and her unwillingness to settle for less; he thinks vaguely he envies her. After him, Mike leaves, ready to pack up and go after a lifetime of prison. Reluctantly, eventually, Bev has to go back to New York to start the divorce proceedings, and Ben has to go stop his business from falling apart without him. Eventually, it is just Clive, Richie, and Eddie.

Richie always thrived on being a chronically embarrassing, annoying person. As a kid he was shameless in his attempts to gross out and upset people, saying the worst shit whenever he liked without batting an eye; he was not shy or reluctant, would openly crack jokes in front of teachers or Eddie’s mom, would talk back to his parents in a way Eddie never dared. He was called Trashmouth for a reason. 

In front of Clive he becomes reticent in a way that is so uncharacteristic it gets under Eddie’s skin. Eddie does not know what to do when Richie is quiet and it makes him frantic. He talks fifty to the dozen when it’s the three of them alone in his room, ranting about work, the state of the hospital, the food, the hotel. Whatever comes into his mind that will fill the silence, trying to goad Richie into talking, laughing, making a joke, a loose end when he is the only one of their double act trying to keep the plates spinning. The whole time Clive watches with increasing profound confusion, eventually quietly asking one of the nurses if there might be a drug that’s making Eddie so frantic and out of sorts. Richie just rolls his eyes and says:

“This is just like when you broke Ben’s paddleball.”

“At least I got it back in the end,” Eddie says. 

Richie doesn’t like Clive. Eddie doesn’t know why, but he has a suspicion, one that makes his heart sink into his stomach every time he considers it. 

“Of course it does,” rings loudly in Eddie’s mind. He wants to ask  _ why _ but he doesn’t think he’d like the answer. 

Eddie has never been that loud about being gay. Clive thinks pride and people who don’t shut up about their sexuality are gauche, and he’s quietly always agreed. Rubbing shoulders mostly with liberal wealthy New Yorkers, he rarely faces any visible homophobia. Oh, it’s  _ there,  _ in the dismissive, offensive comments his colleagues make, but it isn’t the overt, aggressive kind of homophobia, so he tells himself not to make a big deal out of it. His gayness has always been in the background, not invasive. He never wants to be too overt. The idea someone would still object to it, with how much he has always tried not to be intrusive, is disheartening. The idea that Richie would is crushing.

As kids, Richie had been homophobic. They all had been; it had been the 80s and the AIDs crisis was something that kept Eddie up at night, fearful in an instinctive way he didn’t understand until later, until he realised that his fear was recognition of the self in the other. Richie though… Eddie had hoped he had grown out of his childish offensiveness, his snide comments about things being  _ for queers,  _ about things  _ making you gay,  _ but now he has doubts. The others grew out of their homophobia, but it feels too possible that Richie’s just  _ grew,  _ morphed into the kind of aggression that Eddie is always trying to avoid. He wants it not to be true. He is afraid of what Richie sees him as, if he’s still the leper in his eyes.

Clive doesn’t like Richie either, but Eddie didn’t expect him to. He is cold and not especially polite, an attitude that screams  _ why are you here, why the fuck are you here, in my space, in the place where my husband nearly died.  _ Eddie wakes up on the day he is due to leave when Clive arrives at his hospital room. Richie is already there and the atmosphere in the room turns icy the moment Clive opens the door. 

“What are you doing here?” Clive says.

“I wanted to say goodbye to Eddie,” Richie says.

“You just invite yourself in? To his hospital room? Do you not think that’s inappropriate?”

“No. I don’t. I think it’s inappropriate you’re trying to bully his friends out of the way.”

Eddie peeks from mostly closed eyes, flat on his back with his head lolled to the side. Through his eyelashes, Clive is pale and angry. Richie is hunched in his dark leather jacket, shoulders squared. They remind Eddie of fighting cats; the arched backs, the bristling fur, the tension in the silences.

“Listen. I understand you were all the best of friends when you were kids. But right now, you are strangers. You don’t know my husband or his life. You have just invited yourself in and nearly gotten him killed-” Clive says.

“You don’t understand,” Richie says. “You don’t understand shit.”

“What, am I supposed to think there’s something mystical about being  _ friends  _ in  _ middle school?  _ I am his  _ husband.” _ Clive stops to take a breath. “But you don’t respect that, do you? You never have.”

There is a long silence. Eddie feels sick.

“Tell him I came by to say goodbye,” Richie says as he leaves, gone through the door in a second, too fast for Eddie to react. 

Mortified, Eddie lies still for a few minutes longer. Clive sighs, settles into a chair by Eddie’s side. When Eddie ‘wakes up’, he asks after Richie. 

“He went back to LA already,” Clive says. “I think he had work.”

Eddie wants to be angry that Clive is lying to him, but he thinks that would be hypocritical.

Richie doesn’t have work because his manager is spitting nails. His tour has been cancelled, refunds have had to be shelled out through the nose, his reputation is fucked with a dozen different theatres, there are thousands upon thousands of disappointed fans. Richie sits in the office in his apartment as Steve glowers at him from the screen of his phone. He has just fed him the official Loser cover story.

“So, from the angle of being a human being who has feelings,” Steve says. “Rushing off to go and look after a sick friend is very noble and sympathetic.”

“And from the PR angle?” Richie says. He is wearing a clean T-shirt and the same pyjama pants he’s been wearing for three days so he is aiming not to let Steve see him below the waist.

“Your image is not that of an empathetic, caring man and most of your fans are trolls who get uncomfortable when someone cries and think women are the only ones with emotions,” Steve says. “If you get on TV and start talking about how you were helping a friend through issues with their mental health they’re going to think you’re a pussy… Or that it’s a lie and you’re covering up that you were in rehab.”

Richie scrubs his face with his hands and sighs bodily. 

“What do we do, then?” He says, face still in his hands. “Bearing in mind I don’t really want to be on Kimmel rehashing my friend’s suicide attempt for a million gawking idiots who aren’t going to care anyway.”

“Yeah, I get that. Look, you’ve been AWOL for a month. We roll the dice on keeping quiet and the story is going to fizzle out, but we lose control of the narrative. People will decide for themselves what happened to you. We come back with a story, we have more control.” Steve’s eyes flick over Richie. Whatever he thinks is not clear. “But whichever we do, you need to be working on something. We don’t have to put out a public statement, but people in the industry need to know you’re not drinking yourself to death in a backroom. Something  _ real,  _ not ‘working on your memoirs’ obvious bullshit. The public can be convinced, but if your peers think you’re toxic, then you’re fucked. You don’t want to go into detail about your friend, fine, we say it was a family tragedy. Let them think your dad died, I don’t care if that’s misleading, no one’s going to pry too much into that. But we need you working, soon.”

Steve uses ‘we’ a lot. Richie isn’t sure anymore how much of this is what he needs and how much is what Steve needs for Richie to still be a valuable client to him. Richie’s fingers play a tune on the flesh of his arm as he thinks. Steve’s eyes narrow as he picks up on his obvious reluctance.

“What are you thinking?” He says. 

“I don’t know if I’m ready,” Richie says. 

“What do you mean? You’ve been doing this for nearly twenty years.”

“I know. I don’t know if I can do it anymore.”

Steve frowns. When he speaks, he sounds honestly concerned. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t think…” Richie says, then lets out a little laugh. “That could be the whole headline. I don’t think.” 

“I need a little more than that, Tozier.”

Steve is not a bad guy. There are a lot of really terrible, brutal managers in Hollywood. Steve has never been one of them. Richie has been working with him for about five years; Steve picked him up when his last manager had enough, and they’ve done good business together. Richie has been on the rise, managed to crawl out of the depressive slump that nearly tanked his career in the 2010s. Now, he knows that Steve doesn’t want it to happen again. Richie thinks that Steve doubts Richie can be saved from a second slump. 

Reconnected with his family, Richie should feel elated. For the first time in his life he is actually in touch with himself, with people that matter. He is no longer alone. Instead of being happy, he is poisonously aware of the fact that his daily life is so disconnected from the reality of who he is that he might as well be doing 9-5 in a prison. It doesn’t matter if he goes home on holidays.

“I don’t like who I am to people,” Richie says.

“You’re not the guy you play on stage. I know that, your friends know that.”

“I can’t keep being that guy. I can’t keep hiding behind him. It’s fucking… I can’t keep living a lie. I’m sick of being a fucking coward.”

Steve takes a deep breath. “You want to come out?”

“I don’t know.” Richie slumps in his chair. “I just know I don’t want to be that other guy anymore.”

He thinks about standing in front of IT and holding the rock aloft and the stupid fucking grin he’d had on his face. When he had been there, trying to save Mike, he had not thought,  _ I’m about to die,  _ he had thought  _ we are going to live forever.  _ He wishes they were there now. Alone in his office, he feels like he might as well be the only man on the moon. 

He doesn’t want to live forever the way he has been.

“I used to see all those kids on TV with like… Rainbow hair and slogans on their shirts, talking about their stories, and I always thought it was fucking mortifying. Like what are you  _ doing,  _ everyone can  _ see _ you…” Richie sighs. “But they look a hell of a lot happier than I do.”

He can see himself in the corner of the screen. He looks tired.

Steve nods slowly.

“People will hate you. I’m not saying that to put you off, I’m just not going to lie to you. It will be hard. It will be  _ really  _ hard. You will probably lose almost all your fans. A lot of people will think you’re pulling a stunt, a lot of them will hate you because of your old material. It’ll be rough, for a while.” His voice is even and non-judgemental. He watches Richie to make sure he’s listening. “A while. Not forever.”

Richie nods. He pulls a loose thread on the sleeve of his shirt.

“I need to think about it,” he says.

“Ok. Can you think about it on the set of the new Adam Sandler movie, by any chance?”

It’s Richie’s turn to glare. “ _ No.” _

“Worth asking.”

He needs to not be alone. Bill is no longer in LA; he chased production of his film up to Canada where they were shooting remotely. Mike is driving down the east coast on some vague mission to see distant family who live in North Carolina before he goes to see Stan down in Georgia. Bev, Ben, and Eddie are all in New York. So, Richie goes to New York. He can pretend he’s working while he’s there at least.

It’s fall. Richie meets with Bev and Ben upstate and they look at the trees outside of the restaurant where they eat lunch. 

“I feel like I haven’t seen seasons since I was a kid,” Richie says. “LA doesn’t have seasons. It’s just one long hot, humid year. I miss winter.”

“You should see the winters we get in Nebraska,” Ben says. 

“No thanks,” Richie says. “I want a fairytale snowy Christmas, not an audition for the even more offensive remake of  _ Nanook of the North. _ ”

“What are you doing for Christmas? We should try to do a group thing. Someone can host. Wait, what about Hanukkah? Are you doing anything for that?”

“Ben, no one needs to fly across the US for  _ Hanukkah.  _ I haven’t even gone to temple for Yom Kippur for years, I’m not going to start worrying about observing because I want a jelly donut.”

“I think Ben just wants excuses for us to meet up,” Bev says gently. She is eating a steak the size of her head. Richie is slightly curious about if she’ll be physically able to eat the entire thing.

Ben shrugs slightly sheepishly. He does not live in New York; he has an apartment there, where he and Bev are staying while divorce proceedings continue. Richie gets the impression that he did not want to return home without her, without any of the others. He doesn’t want to be alone again. Richie sympathises.

“Hanukkah is only the week before Christmas this year,” Richie says. “If we meet up early me and Stan can make you some fuckin’ latkes or something.”

Ben smiles. 

“When are you and Eddie meeting up?” Bev says. “Can we tag along or is it a two-man job?”

“We haven’t planned anything,” Richie says. 

She startles. “What? How? I thought you two would be… You know. Richie-and-Eddie.”

She says it like it’s one word. A verifiable unit of measurement. A lump forms in Richie’s throat.

“I think he’s avoiding me,” Richie says.

Eddie is not very active in the group chat; the honour of  _ heaviest texter _ unsurprisingly goes to Richie, though most of what he sends is light on substance and heavy on jokes. The most active talkers are probably Mike, Bill, and Ben. Eddie only crops up every couple of days. He rarely texts Richie directly. They don’t call. Richie feels like he’s not supposed to.

“Have you tried talking to him?” Bev says.

“If he doesn’t want to talk to me I’m not going to force him.”

“It’s just not like him,” Ben says. “Something must be going on.”

He misses Eddie. He misses the others too, but Stan picks up when he calls. Mike videocalled him from a forest in the middle of nowhere. Bill writes him emails that are twenty pages long and have nicer prose than many of the published William Denbrough novels. Eddie is a ghost when Richie needs him to be solid most. 

So, he calls Eddie and tells him he’s in New York. When Eddie answers the phone he sounds oddly hopeful in a way that Richie hadn’t been expecting and that makes his heart sit in his throat.

“You’re in New York? Like now?” Eddie says.

“Yes. Let’s meet up,” Richie says. “I miss you.”

He is fearful when he says it, like it will be rejected, like Eddie will put the phone down on him. When they were children, making calls to Eddie’s house was often a dangerous activity because you risked hearing the crackle of his mother picking up the other line and spying on you, forcing them to shroud their conversations in code. Now Richie fears Clive leaning in around corners, saying  _ stay away from my husband. He doesn’t belong to you fully, he never will.  _

“I miss you too,” Eddie says, and Richie tries not to smile as much as he is.

As soon as he got back to New York Eddie discovered he hates recovering from any kind of illness. His injury requires him to sleep a lot for the first several weeks as his body knits itself back together. He is lucky that the injury isn’t worse; he lost a lot of blood, but that’s replaceable. The organs that were narrowly avoided would not have been. He now has a large, ugly patch on his side where the skin was stitched back together. Additionally, the wound on his face got infected, and he endures burning pain and cold for some time before his body fights the infection off and he is left with a large, gnarled scar that takes up a large part of his left cheek. 

He refuses to cover it up. He sees the way Clive eyes it, like it is something distasteful and shameful, as though Eddie has taken to walking around their penthouse apartment with his cock out at 2 in the afternoon. Eddie has never had any particular inclination to walk around his house nude, but he finds that he suddenly resents that he would not have the option. Clive is uncomfortable not wearing underwear under his pyjamas. 

When Bev starts going through her divorce, Eddie confides in Clive about it. Clive is understandably horrified by her situation. 

“We should ask her to stay with us,” Eddie says. Clive goes taciturn as he chops vegetables and the silence stretches on for a little too long. 

“That wouldn’t work,” he says, eventually.

“What? Why not? She needs help.”

“We don’t have the space. And I can’t entertain guests all by myself while you’re sick. It’s not fair of you to ask that of me.” Clive drops the knife with a clunk. “You have no idea how much you’re asking of me every day.”

Eddie doesn’t know what to say. 

“I’m sorry,” is all he can think of.

“And frankly, talking about how hard your friend is having it… It’s manipulative. You want me to feel like I can’t say no.”

“That’s not true, I just care about her.”

“You care about her so much you never mentioned her once before in ten years, now they’re all you can think about. The only people you care about.” Clive dumps the vegetables into a wok; they sizzle when they touch the oil.

“That’s not true,” Eddie says again, though there’s more truth to it than he’d like to admit. 

Clive doesn’t like caring for someone who’s unwell, which was initially something Eddie found very attractive about him, but after being in a position where he is forced to rely on someone else to do the things he doesn’t have the strength for, like cook or clean, he finds that the lack of sympathy he faces is not useful or encouraging. It doesn’t make him feel any better about asking through gritted teeth if  _ he can get some help, please,  _ when Clive is hesitant and sometimes even scornful. Eddie realises quickly that he resents having to help. When Eddie asks if he can work from home, Clive becomes irritable.

“Not all of us can run away from our jobs whenever we want,” he says.

Eddie lost his job. They were sorry he was hurt, but not willing to forgive that he vanished for a week without informing them he was leaving. Eddie does not miss it. It’s a relief, actually. He had not been sure how he was going to tell Clive he wanted to quit.

He got to be bad at keeping up with the group chat. At first it was because he was too tired, sleeping most of every day as he recovered, unable to really comprehend what was going on in the tiny bright screen of his phone where his friends rambled away at each other. He couldn’t keep track, losing time between days, coming back and finding the conversation had shifted, jokes had developed without him. The resounding feeling he had was that, for how happy they were when he contributed, they seemed to be getting on very well without him. 

When Richie calls and more or less informs Eddie that they are going to meet up, Eddie finds that he is happier than he expected to be. Sitting alone in his empty apartment, his husband having left him to go to work, Eddie is grateful that Richie wants to see him. He’s also happy that the one who demanded to see him first, of all the Losers, is Richie.

They meet in the MoMA, which was not something that Eddie would have guessed that either Richie or himself were interested in. Eddie knows roughly jackshit about art, but it turns out Richie knows a surprising amount. That, or he is remarkably talented at bullshitting. They get to an exhibition on the art and film movement of New York’s East Village in the 1970s. Keith Haring, Richard Hambleton, Tseng Wong Chi, Fab 5 Freddy. Richie stops Eddie and tells him about the career of a performance artist called John Sex, who performed with a python, claimed he put semen in his hair to keep it in his iconic style. Richie’s face is filled with admiration while he discusses these artists, the transgressive nature of it all, how daring they were in an era where Reaganism and conservatism were rampant. 

“How do you know about all this?” Eddie asks later, as they walk from the MoMA to catch an Uber to get lunch somewhere decent. He has to walk slowly and Richie is forced to take small steps, idling in Eddie’s shadow. 

“When I was like, twenty, friend at the time was like, ‘you guys want to watch the most fucked up movie ever?’ and we were like, hell yeah. And it turns out to be  _ Pink Flamingos.  _ And it is fucked up like, this woman, this drag queen Divine, she eats dog shit and they kill a chicken and there’s a guy waving around his prolapsed anus…” Richie lights a cigarette and Eddie allows it, because the smoke is blowing away from him and also because Richie is mid-flow, gesticulating wildly as he talks, his obvious enthusiasm pouring out of him in a wave that Eddie is happy to be caught up in. “But it was  _ brilliant,  _ too. Those morons couldn’t see it, they thought they were too smart for the joke, but I just… It was so fucking clever and funny, and I’d never seen anything like it. And I wanted to know more about these people. So I start reading about Divine and John Waters, and there’s this whole film scene I never knew about, these filmmakers making this art that was so fucking awful and crazy… I wish I could make something half that fucking good.”

He finally stops for breath when they reach their Uber. Eddie waves to the driver, who gestures for them to get in.

“Why don’t you?” Eddie says.

“Why don’t I what?” Richie says, opening the door for him theatrically. 

“Make a film like that. You have connections, you must be able to put together funding to make a fucking movie.”

“Uh, because I want to have a career, Spaghetti, and you don’t come back from something like that and carry on telling boner jokes to frat bros. You couldn’t make a film like that nowadays anyway. Transgressive nowadays is a superhero saying fuck in a film that only cost sixty million instead of a hundred. And all those artists… Well, most of them. They fuckin’ died in the 90s.”

Eddie doesn’t need to ask how, or why. He remembers when they were both kids, how real and present that fear had felt, when none of them thought they had ever even  _ seen  _ a gay person. It hung over him even now, that fear, in the form of the leper. He wasn’t stupid, he’d put the pieces together on that one. 

“Hey, are you Richie Tozier?” The Uber driver asks.

“No, I’m his much more handsome brother, Mitchy Rozier,” Richie says.

“Why the fuck would you have different last names?” Eddie says. 

“Uh, we have different dads? Don’t be fucking insensitive.”

It does not escape Eddie’s notice that the artists Richie are praising are all gay. That he claims to feel a  _ connection _ to the works of gay men. He bites the tip of his tongue and wonders if Richie is bringing all this up to win points or if it’s genuine and Eddie’s just being paranoid. 

They get lunch in a Japanese restaurant that Richie has never heard of and Eddie is slightly smug to be able to introduce him to. They make, Eddie thinks, a good team. He just wishes he knew if Richie was secretly a violent homophobe. In his own time, he asked the others what they thought, in turn. A strange and difficult question to broach,  _ do you think our good friend has an issue with my marriage? Do you think it’s because I’m gay? _

“What? No. Did he say something? No,” Bill had said, distracted and alarmed.

“He met Clive at a very stressful time, I’m sure things are different outside of Derry,” Ben had said.

“Maybe he has an issue with Colin, but not because he has an issue with  _ you,” _ had been Bev’s contribution. 

“I think you need to talk to Richie about this,” Mike had said before the connection cut out as he drove into a tunnel.

“All of us grow up in a biased, bigoted society with intolerance and oppression built into our country’s history and interned into out instutions, and all we can do is try to unlearn the racism, homophobia and misogyny we’ve been taught from birth,” Stan had said, which didn’t really answer Eddie’s question and raised a lot more. Stan said he was going to send him some books. It sounded like a serious threat.

Eddie wished he knew where to begin. 

“What  _ are  _ you doing now?” He asks Richie. “If you aren’t making arthouse cinema?”

“Nothing. Lying in my own filth. Wallowing in misery. What about you?” Richie says.

“Healing from a large wound in my waist. Spending time with Clive.”

Richie freezes with a piece of katsu chicken halfway to his mouth. His eyes are wide and Eddie’s stomach twists.  _ He’s uncomfortable. He wanted to forget all about this.  _

“How uh… How are things… Going?” Richie says, carefully, like he’s walking on a frozen lake that has started to crack and he’s scared of what might be below.

“Not well.”

Richie’s face is immediately alert. “What? Why?”

“He hates that I’m injured. He hates that I left. He hates all of you.”

“He sounds like a fucking asshole, Eds.”

“He’s not a fucking asshole. I mean I… I ran out on him, I abandoned him. I am lying to him every day.”

“You  _ had  _ to come.”

“Yeah, he doesn’t see it that way. He just doesn’t understand.” Eddie pokes at his food. “There’s no way to explain… Don’t you think that’s weird? That only us seven will ever know?”

“I think I’m fine with that,” Richie says. “Who else would I tell?”

“Like if you ever have a partner?”

Richie laughs to himself. “I don’t think I’m the marrying type. Who would settle down with this?”

He pulls a face to try and make himself look less attractive, shows off his snub nose, his sleepy eye, but all Eddie can think about is how cute he is when he smiles and he gets the crinkles at the corner of his eyes, how happy he looks whenever Eddie smiles at him.

When Eddie gets back home Clive is annoyed. He is sitting on the couch in the living room, pointedly looking at the television.

“You shouldn’t go out on your own if you’re so weak,” he says, voice dripping with sarcasm. “Anything could happen to you. You might faint.”

“I’m fine,” Eddie says. “Anyway, I wasn’t alone. I was with Richie.”

“Oh.”

Eddie takes off his coat and scarf, hangs his coat in the hall closet. After a second, he turns to Clive again.

“Why didn’t you tell me Richie came to see me before he left?” He says. “He told you to say goodbye to me for him.”

Clive’s expression is unchanging. If he is embarrassed about being caught in the lie, he doesn’t show it at all. He doesn’t even seem irritated that Eddie is pushing him about it.

“I don’t like that man,” he says. 

“I don’t care. He’s my friend. And he doesn’t lie to me.”

“Yes, wouldn’t it be nice to have a partner who doesn’t lie to you or hide things from you,” Clive says, his eyes sharp and his voice sharper.

Richie likes New York with people, he thinks. Last time he was here on tour, a year ago, he found himself overwhelmed by the size of it, hyperaware of his own loneliness in the unfamiliar city. Spending time with Bev, Ben and Eddie, he enjoys it more. The size of the city starts to feel less hostile and more like something he can explore, a map he can learn. 

Steve, as tolerant as he is of Richie’s struggle, is irritated by his impromptu vacation. Richie explains it away, that he needs to spend time with his friends to ‘center himself’, but Steve is worried about the long term, and being unemployed and bumming around New York is not a good long-term plan. Gossip sites have started to pick up on him being in New York, but there’s little to say about him of interest.  _ After disappearance, Richie Tozier spotted getting lunch. Richie Tozier spotted in the theatre. Richie Tozier spotted shopping.  _ There is no interesting narrative for them to cling to; he just looks like a man living. This, at least, pleases Steve.

“The least you can do is stay on the straight and narrow,” he says, then reconsiders this. “The narrow, at least. The straight is optional.”

“Thanks, buddy.”

He has not come out to anyone else yet. He calls Stan and asks what he thinks, standing on the balcony of his hotel room and looking out at the gold and brown leaves drifting down the street and lights a cigarette.

“It’s not about should,” Stan says. “It’s about what makes you happier. But I can confidently say your friends will love and support you. And in my opinion, it would be good for you. I don’t think shutting up about things suits you.”

“Mm. Thanks, Staniel, I love the insult thrown in at the end there just for a little spice,” Richie says. “But I don’t think you’re wrong.”

“I very rarely am. Though I have a blindspot when it comes to myself, occasionally.”

“Yeah, only when it’s  _ most  _ important does your judgement lead you astray.”

“My timing is impeccable.” There’s a noise on Stan’s end, like he’s pouring a cup of tea. Richie imagines, for a moment, the quiet comfort of the Uris’ suburban home. “But I’ve realised something since I got back.”

“What’s that?”

“I like my life.”

_ Fuck,  _ Richie thinks.  _ That sounds good. _

“Are you coming to Ben’s for Christmas?” He asks instead. “Sorry, his faith inclusive seasonal celebration?” 

“Solstice is a filthy pagan tradition,” Stan says. “But I’ll come. I’m hoping Ben inherited his mother’s chocolate pie recipe.”

Richie still isn’t sure what he’s doing with his future, but he has his friends. He spends a weekend at Ben and Bev’s place while she works through the nightmare of her divorce. Bev is full of fire and brimstone and wrath she has nowhere to place. Richie brings over a watermelon and she throws it off the balcony and screams at the sky so loud next door’s dog starts barking. Afterwards she pours them all too much wine as they sit on the floor, Bev and Richie lying on the obscenely plush rug in the middle of the living room as Ben watches from the couch.

“I’m going to take him for everything I’m worth,” Bev says viciously before trying to pull the cork out of a bottle with her teeth and hurting her jaw. Richie laughs so hard he cries.

They talk about bad relationships; Beverly’s are darker but she is sardonically funny in a way that Richie understands and also aches over, knowing how it feels to brush over the darkest parts of you with a laugh. Ben tells them about a girl who took him on a date to her family’s private island and then abandoned him there without telling him, leaving him to sit through a horrible dinner with her family before he realised he’d been ghosted. Richie tells him that’s what he deserves for associating with the rich. Beverly laughs and kisses Ben on the knuckles, calls him her sweet boy.

“I dated someone who didn’t want to be seen in public with me,” Richie says. “One time I had to leave his apartment down the fire escape but there wasn’t a ladder so I ended up asking the people on the floor below if I could leave through their apartment.”

“Richie, that’s horrible,” Bev says.

“It was a long time ago.”

“It’s still horrible. You deserve a nice boy.” Bev sips her wine. She is drunk and has gone very pink from the wine. “If that’s what you want.”

“I don’t like nice boys,” Richie says. 

“What do you like?”

“Mean little men who bite.”

Bev laughs and then claps a hand over her mouth in shock. Richie raises his eyebrows and finishes his glass.

_ “Eddie?” _ She says. “Since when?”

“Since I was eight years old. He told me I had to be Chewbacca if we played Star Wars because he wanted to be Han Solo.” 

“Are you going to tell him?” Bev says between her fingers. 

“He’s married. It would just stress him out. It wouldn’t be fair.”

Ben has been tearing up for the past few minutes. Richie stares up at him from the floor in disbelief. 

“He always cries when he drinks wine,” Bev says, with overwhelming fondness.

“I just think it’s nice we all love each other,” Ben says.

There’s a cold snap at the start of November. The streets are icy and Richie nearly throws his back out slipping on the sidewalk outside his hotel. He tells Eddie, who can’t decide if wants to laugh about it or to fuss over Richie with the same absolutely infuriating, slightly patronising, deeply loveable way he always fusses over Richie. Richie asks if he wants to go ice skating.

“Are you on fucking cocaine?” Eddie says. “I turned forty two months ago, I’ve been recovering from surgery, you want me to learn to ice skate  _ now?” _

They go to the ice skating rink. It is mostly full of couples and families. Eddie steps onto the ice with the determination of a man stepping onto the surface of the moon for the first time. His pose is that of a man who does not trust that none of his limbs will betray him at any moment, legs slightly splayed, shoulders rigid, his hands gripping onto the side so tightly he might leave marks in the aluminum siding. It cracks up Richie so bad he can’t stand for a moment, just sitting on the steps by the rink laughing so hard he weeps. Eddie watches him the furious futile anger of a cat that’s been put in a funny outfit by its owner. 

“Get out here,” Eddie demands. “You did this to me.”

“I’m sorry,” Richie says between gulps of air. “I thought you’d be more graceful.”

“What have I ever done in my  _ entire life, _ ” Eddie says, “would make you think I am  _ fucking graceful, Richie.” _

Richie manages to stop laughing for long enough to step onto the ice himself, and then promptly falls, hitting the barrier with his back and slowly sinking down onto his ass.

“Do you not know how to ice skate?” Eddie says.

“No,” Richie says.

“Why the fuck-- Why in the fuck would you make us come out here?!” Eddie says, spluttering with anger. He realises exactly why at that minute and makes a noise somewhere between a sigh and a shout. 

He helps Richie to his feet, leaning against the barrier for support. They cling onto each other, some kind of weird four legged animal, a costume horse without the costume. Eddie holds onto Richie’s forearms for dear life. 

“If you keep holding onto me we’re going to be stuck like this,” Richie says. “You have to let go a little.”

“No,” Eddie says. “We’ll both fall over.”

“If you don’t let go we’re going to stay right in this spot forever.”

“That’s fine.”

“No, come on. We have to move a little bit. We can’t stay here forever, we’ll starve to death. Come on. Just hold onto one of my arms and we can do the fucking… Sliding about thing.”

“You don’t know how to skate,” Eddie says, full of rage and bitterness and a distinct thirst for blood. “You don’t know how to skate and you made me get on the ice and I  _ hate  _ you.”

He lets go of one of Richie’s arms so they can both face forwards.

“If I fall over, I will die,” Eddie says. “All my bones will instantly shatter and I’ll die.”

“When did you get to be such a pussy?” Richie says. “If you fall, just fall against my massive body. I’ll shield you.”

Having Eddie clinging onto him makes Richie feel big in a way he actually likes; a lot of the time he feels clumsy, awkward, his bulk and height obstacles that make him too noticeable for his liking. With Eddie against him it all feels suddenly worth it.

Together they manage to gently glide around the edge of the rink, clinging to each other and the barrier for support. Very slowly they start to get the hang of the motion, taking a few steps forwards and then gliding a little. It is a surprisingly exhausting activity, but they make some progress. After about twenty minutes Richie slips again and falls over in an incredibly slow way that he seems to be completely unable to stop, pulling Eddie down with him. He laughs hysterically the entire time, tugging Eddie into his arms. 

“I caught you!” He says, squeezing close the wriggling Eddie, who reacts to the hug like someone trying to capture a stray cat until there is no resisting it and Richie is flat on his back on the ice. There is a moment, when his arms are around Eddie, that wishes he could curl himself around Eddie and the two of them could stay there together forever, just them against the bleak white ice. 

A passer by comes over to help them to their feet. Blessedly, he doesn’t recognise Richie. Unblessedly, he notices Eddie’s wedding ring and asks the two of them how long they’ve been married. Normally the suggestion would be jarring to Richie, but he rolls with it.

“Twenty-seven years,” Richie says. 

The man blinks at them. “How old did you get married, twelve?”

“He’s jerking you around,” Eddie says, “we’re not married.”

The guy laughs and helps them off the rink. Eddie’s face is burning pink and Richie doesn’t know if it’s from the cold or from the conversation. He is conspicuously quiet as they take their skates off and turn them in. 

“Are you ok?” Richie says.

“Yeah, no, it’s nothing.”

It doesn’t look like nothing. 

“I’m sorry about the ice skating. I don’t know why I thought it would be funny.”

“It’s fine, Rich. I don’t care.”

There is a viciously cold wind whipping in off the river and Richie turns up the collar of his coat against it. Eddie winds a scarf around his neck and Richie gently tugs on one end of it, pulling Eddie closer to him.

“What is it?” He says again, more gently.

“Nothing,” Eddie says. “I like spending time with you.”

“I like spending time with you too.”

Richie can feel his heart beating hard in his chest, but it’s not quick. Slow, deliberate, he is painfully aware of what he is doing as he reaches out a hand to brush a stray curl of hair back off Eddie’s forehead. He knows exactly what it looks like when he pulls Eddie’s scarf straight and tucks the end into his peacoat. Eddie is watching him with those dark, solemn eyes, and Richie can barely bring himself to meet them.

“You know,” Richie says, “for a long time, I couldn’t ever touch guys like this. I was too scared that people would look at me and think, ‘that guy is a fucking homo’. I would always have my hands in my pockets, all hunched up like… This, y’know?”

He hunches his shoulders as demonstration. Eddie’s face has turned sour. 

“Really,” Eddie says.

“Yeah, man, I was always so scared that people would think I was gay. It was like, consuming every part of my life. I was micromanaging shit that no one in a million years would think about. It was lonely. Not ever letting myself touch people. You get lonely. But I guess I don’t feel like that anymore.”

“Oh, well, that’s real fucking magnamous of you, Rich, I’m glad having a gay friend helped you get over your homophobia. I’m really happy I could be a good learning experience for you.”

He shoves Richie’s hands away from him, his face cold and hard as the ice on the rink behind them. Part of Richie wants to run, immediately, the rising pressure in his throat that screams  _ he hates you now, he hates you now,  _ but he resists it.

“I don’t think you’re hearing what I’m saying,” Richie says.

“No, I hear you. You used to think being gay was repulsive, but now you think it’s-”

“I’m trying to come out to you, Eds.”

Eddie’s face goes slack with shock. More out of nerves than anything else, Richie giggles a little. He is staring at their shoes, his own battered boots, Eddie’s slightly weather inappropriate brown leather oxfords. 

“Richie, I had no idea,” Eddie says, slightly breathless. “When did you…”

“When I was twelve.”

“Jesus. Why did you never say anything?”

Eddie’s hand is on his elbow. 

“I didn’t think… I thought I was alone,” Richie says.

“God, is that what you tried to tell me when we were leaving Neibolt?” He says.

Richie blinks. He thought Eddie had forgotten that. “Uh. No. That was… It wasn’t important.”

“Fuck. I’m sorry. About all this.”

“No, it’s fine. You didn’t… Look.” Richie puts his hands on Eddie’s shoulders. “We were both kids back then, we didn’t know any better. But you’ve been there for me now. You saved my life, Eddie.”

“I told you not to make a big deal out of it. We’re even, remember?”

“We’re not, are we? You nearly died saving me. I would have understood if you hadn’t.”

The fury that sparks in Eddie is so sudden and explosive it seems to surprise even him. 

“You think I could have lived with that?” He says. “Turning my back on you? If I knew I was going to die then, I still would have done it. I would do it every time.”

“I just want you to know you don’t have to do… Anything like that for me to love you. I would love you anyway.” Richie’s eyes are not quite meeting Eddie’s. “I love you. Unconditionally. That’s enough for me.”

He had said as much before, in Neibolt, where the words had fallen disorganised from his lips like the blood coming out of Eddie’s poor little broken body had dripped through Richie’s fingers as he clutched him. At the time he had not been sure he would ever have a chance to tell Eddie properly, and he is grateful now that he can see Eddie try to understand that Richie Tozier loves him.

“And I’m trying to say that I want to do things for you,” Eddie insists. “Because  _ I  _ love you. Because I think you’re worth it.”

There is a pause, though there is no quiet, because the city is in full swing around them. Traffic rushes by, people’s voices drift over them. Despite all that, the two of them feel like the pinpoint of the universe. Richie knows that none of them are the heroes the world revolves around, but that doesn’t feel the case right then. Right then, the world is vibrant and full of life, but Eddie Kaspbrak is still the only thing that matters. There have been so many times Richie has thought about Eddie saying those words, but Richie senses that right now, it is not the way he has been dreaming. 

“You’re my best friend,” Eddie says, softly. It is, Richie tells himself, enough.

Richie comes out to all of the others when he returns to LA. Bill returns in November and Mike suddenly appears, having gotten bored of being alone and now looking for his friends again, and Richie tells them both. He seems happier, but Eddie is sad he left. He’s also strangely sad when his job hunt turns out successful and towards the end of November he is back sitting in a glass-walled New York office. This time it is an investment firm rather than an insurance company, but it means very little difference in the grand scheme of things. With things more back to normal, Clive has relaxed. The pressure has decreased, like someone flipped a valve and said they can stop worrying about things and go back to routine. The degree to which they have alarms Eddie a little bit; after you kill a god for the second time he thinks that things should be a little more different, but the change in commute and the fact he has to do a slightly different workout at the gym to accommodate for the muscle weakness on his right side are the only visible alterations from their old lives. Most of the others are flipping their lives around; Bev’s divorce is splattered on the tabloids in lurid colours (not that Eddie considers that much of a win for her), Stan and Patty are talking about kids, Mike is travelling America, Ben is with the love of his life, Bill is  _ also  _ getting divorced, making that two out of seven in the Losers Club. The only ones who don’t seem to have changed are him and Richie.

Eddie has been reading about gay artists in the 70s and 80s, the AIDs crisis, the activism after Stonewall. There are several books stacked up on his nightstand. Clive looks at them with deep skepticism, as if he has taken up reading about alien abduction and flat Earth theory. Eddie did not realise how much about this time he didn’t know. He always avoided knowing too much, intentionally, as if the ignorance was somehow protective.

“Why are you reading so much about this now?” Was Clive’s constant refrain.

“It’s our history,” Eddie said.

“It’s not our history, we don’t know any of those people. It’s not  _ our history _ just because we’re all gay. That’s like saying all gay people know each other. Anyway, it’s not like that anymore, is it?”

Eddie has started to realise he doesn’t really know that many other gay people at  _ all.  _ His friends in New York are largely all straight, or are demure, married, upper middle class middle-aged gay people like himself and Clive, who have all become integrated into straight society as seamlessly. Eddie used to never think about it, but has found that it is near impossible for him to forget now that he has noticed. He has started to notice things a lot more now, as if the veil has suddenly been ripped off his eyes and he is looking objectively at his life for the first time. 

All of them look at him differently now too. 

The next time he sees the Losers will be over Christmas. They are talking about meeting at Ben’s place in Nebraska, which he promises will house all of them easily.

“It’s isolated though,” Ben says in that week’s group call. “It would really be just us up there.”

“That’s fine. We can have a shamelessly drunken bacchanal in the woods,” Richie says. He winks at Eddie.

“We can stockpile wine and hide out,” Bill says.

“You need to see the wine cellar here,” Bev adds.

Clive is not thrilled by the idea when Eddie pitches it to him over dinner that night. 

“We’re not spending two weeks in the middle of  _ Nebraska _ with your weird friends,” he splutters when Eddie says that the others have started to plan this. “What about my family?”

“We never have a good time at your mother’s,” Eddie says. “We could actually have  _ fun.” _

Clive’s face is sour as he cuts into a lamb cutlet.

“Once again, all you want is to go running off doing what  _ you  _ want. It’s better for Eddie, so how couldn’t it be better for everyone?”

His eyes always flick to the scar on Eddie’s face when they talk, Eddie notices. 

“If we had dinner with Bev and Ben while they’re in New York, you could get to know them better,” Eddie says. “Then you wouldn’t feel like a stranger…”

“I don’t  _ want  _ to get to know them better,” Clive says. “Every time you talk about them all I can think about is how I thought you were dead for  _ days _ because you abandoned me for them and nearly died doing something stupid and pointless. I had to care for you for weeks. Where were they? Off living their lives.”

“It wasn’t stupid or pointless. They’re my best friends-”

“No they’re not!” Clive’s voice has reached a nearly hysterical pitch. “I feel like I’m going  _ crazy,  _ the way you talk about them like they mean something when you haven’t mentioned them once before! It’s like you rewrote your entire history!  _ Everyone  _ thinks you’re going crazy. My mother thinks you had a midlife crisis. I can’t…”

He puts his head in his hands and for a second Eddie thinks he’s going to scream but he just sighs and places his hands back on the table. His perfect blond hair is rumpled.

“I told you, they’re childhood friends, we reconnected…” Eddie says. 

“What happened,” Clive says, voice slow and dangerous, “is you were offered a choice between them and me. And you chose  _ them.” _

Clive is staring daggers at him. Eddie can’t deny that he did let down Clive, by running out on him, by not telling him where he was going, by lying to him about everything that happened. Stan told Patty the truth, Bill never explained the full story to Audra. Eddie just lies, day after day, he lies a little more. He thought he was past that part of his life when he left the closet, but he thinks about how Richie knew he was gay and stayed in the closet for nearly thirty years. The guilt in his chest is transformative, in how every time he listens to it he is suddenly twenty and coming out to his mother, he is thirteen and she is screaming after his arm broke, he is any of the dozens of time he has taken away the pieces of himself that hold him upright in the face of someone who is hurt by his wants and needs, so he shuts down.

“We can go to your mother’s for Christmas,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not just about that, Eddie,” Clive says. “I just don’t know who you are anymore.”

Eddie has to tell his friends he won’t be there for Christmas. It instantly plummets him into a place where he’s unsure when he’s going to see his friends again, a terror that he didn’t think he’d have to relive after their reunion. It plays at the back of his mind like a constant low grade fever, making him feel sick and miserable. He has gotten a taste of being around people who understand him and now he longs for it, the same way someone bedridden with illness pines for wellness. 

Richie was called back by his manager to appear in some commercials for the new Samsung phone, which he describes as being about as interesting as watching paint dry, but easy money, on one of their daily video calls on Eddie’s lunch break.

“I wanted to say thank you,” Richie says. 

“For what?”

“I wouldn’t have been able to come out if I didn’t know you. It… It helped. Like if you were doing ok… I used to think that I’d never be able to be ok... But you’re doing good. And I wanted that too.”

_ Am I ok?  _ Eddie wonders, idly. He has always thought him and Clive were the kind of idealistic gay couple that the others, the ones who were the reason heterosexuals had all these bad ideas about gays should be looking up to. Nowadays he isn’t really sure why he thought that. It feels like something he has always assumed is the case for so long that he no longer questioned it, and now he’s been put on the spot he no longer understands why he thought so in the first place. Eddie doesn’t think there’s anything enviable about him at all.

“I’m just… Doing my best,” Eddie says. 

“How’s your new job?” 

“It’s fine. It’s a little… I don’t know, I just do something because I’m good at it, it’s not like it’s my  _ passion,  _ like you. How’s the comedy?”

“Steve keeps telling me I need to show people I’m working,” Richie says. “If I look normal, there’s no story for people to go crazy about. They all just think my dad died, or something.”

“ _ Look _ normal? You don’t feel normal?” Eddie says, stirring cream into his coffee. 

“No. I feel like my skin is on too tight. I haven’t decided if I want to come out publicly at all but I don’t know how the fuck I’m supposed to go back to comedy if I can’t talk about that part of my life. I can’t go back to being that  _ guy _ again, but how the fuck do I change my image…” Richie runs his fingers through his hair. His curls spring back. Eddie swallows hard. “I need to do something. I have to do  _ something _ with the rest of my life.”

It has started snowing and doesn’t look like it’s going to stop any time soon. Eddie thinks about the idea of being snowed into his house with the same kind of blind terror as someone facing life imprisonment. He feels a sudden refreshed kinship with Mike, thinking of the pain of sitting and watching his friends live and grow and change through a pane of glass. 

“Uhm. You could say the grief or whatever made you rethink. Life’s too short. And you don’t have to talk about relationships like you aren’t - you aren’t in a relationship right now? Are you?” Eddie says. “Unless you are. Which would be fine.”

“No. I’m not really… I’m not the dating type,” Richie says. “Who wants to date this, right?”

He gestures to himself, but what exactly there is that’s unattractive about Richie, Eddie doesn’t see. Eddie presses his lips together and makes a small noise of disagreement. He feels it sometimes like a physical force, how much space inside Richie there is that begs for love to fill it. He is like a void and Eddie is hopelessly caught, spiralling around it. 

“You should try, though,” Eddie says. “You deserve someone who loves you.”

“I have people who love me!” Richie laughs, gently. “I got you, right?”

Eddie feels strangely desperate, as though he is running out of time and he will never have enough with which to make Richie Tozier feel loved. 

That weekend he facetimes Richie again to show him the snowfall outside his building that morning. It is peaceful in his neighborhood right then; people aren’t up yet. The snow is white and unsullied. Eddie wants to share it with someone. 

“Why are you up? Isn’t it like six am there?” Eddie asks as soon as Richie picks up.

“You fucking called me,” Richie says. “I’m in Nebraska now, dude, remember? With Ben?”

“Oh. Right. Is everyone there?”

“Yeah, man. Whole crew, and Patty. It’s actually a good thing you didn’t come, because there’s only four rooms. We wouldn’t have had room. Poor fuckin’ Mike has to bunk with Bill.”

“Well, Mike is still staying at Bill’s place, right? He’s probably used to it.” Eddie’s footsteps leave perfect clean treads in the snow. He switches to the back camera to show Richie.

“Hey, do you go to therapy?” Richie says.

“No? What? Is this because of the snow?”

“No, dumbass, because of our shared trauma.”

“What the fuck do you tell them? You tell them about the clown? You’ll get sectioned if you tell them about the clown.”

He carefully starts marking out an E in the snow.  _ Eddie was here.  _ It feels as imperminant as the rest of his marks on the world. His forgettable job, his forgettable marriage. He wonders how he’s going to handle it when Richie finally finds someone who deserves him, someone who’s as smart and funny and quick as he is. The little angry animal in Eddie’s chest that he only lets out on rare occasions snarls at this imaginary man who will take Richie Tozier away from him, and he quickly reminds himself that Richie was never his to  _ have.  _ Eddie has a Clive. 

“No, I told her a serial killer nearly murdered us twice, it gets the point across ok. It makes me fucking glad I have you guys, though. People who understand. It’s like I suddenly understand what a community is for. It’s making me rethink all this LGBT community stuff, I used to like… This probably sounds crazy to you, you’ve been out for so long, but I was always like ‘why do you need a community’, but that was just the shame talking.” 

Richie is rambling, but Eddie doesn’t want to interrupt again. He continues staking out his claim on the sidewalk. The E takes shape and then he moves onto a plus sign, neat parallel lines. His actual handwriting is a nightmarish scrawl, the clean right angles here are easier. 

“I think the truth was always I was scared,” Richie continues. “Like, I was scared for me and I was scared for people who were out too. That being out would hurt them. And I was jealous, too. I was ashamed so I was angry they weren’t ashamed, so I’d be like ‘who has to make being gay your identity’ and that shit. But we know better than that, right?”

Richie can’t see Eddie’s face and Eddie is suddenly glad of that. He paces out the next line.

“What do you mean?” Eddie says. 

“Living in fear,” Richie says. “That’s all it is. The hiding, the shame. It’s all fear. We didn’t kill that fucking clown to go back to living in fear, right? You gotta take a risk. Like a million little risks, not just big, kill-a-clown risks. And it helps to have people. Sorry, I’m fucking rambling.”

He thinks about coming out a hundred times in your life and how it never really changes until you tell someone you care about.

“No, it’s ok.”

“You’re just the only person I feel like I can talk to about some of this.”

“I feel the same way.” The camera follows as he finishes pacing out the R. 

Afterwards, he walks back up to his apartment, where Clive is preparing for them to leave in a couple of days. There is a stack of wrapped presents in a box in their bedroom, waiting to be put in the trunk of a car. Eddie doesn’t know what’s in any of them or what is for who; Clive has always been in charge of his family’s Christmas shopping. Eddie had his gifts for the Losers shipped to Ben’s house. He thinks about Richie opening the presents he got him and feels a tug in his chest. 

“What is it?” Clive says, noticing him staring. 

“When we met, I always thought how much you were the kind of man I wanted to be,” Eddie says. 

“Thank you.” Clive smiles. “I don’t think you’re that much like me.”

“No, I don’t think so either.”

Clive’s smile falters a little. He is not a bad person, Eddie thinks. He loves his family, he is a caring uncle. He is good to his friends. He works hard. He isn’t a  _ bad  _ person. 

His eyes are on Eddie’s scar again. 

“Do you think you’re ever going to forgive me for leaving?” Eddie says, softly.

“Why are you talking about this now?” Clive says. 

“Every time you look at my scar I can see you thinking about what happened.”

It’s like a symbol, Eddie thinks. A sign.  _ Something happened and I’m different now.  _

Or not different now. Like peeling back layers of himself, he has found an identity. This is who he was all along. 

“You have to be sorry to be forgiven.” Clive folds the pants he is taking and puts them into his suitcase. He pauses. “I don’t want you to beg and grovel for forgiveness, Eddie. I just want you to go back to being the old you. The man I married.”

Eight years ago a man who had never known what it was like to be loved for himself had fallen for a guy who seemed to be the person he’d always wanted to be. Through closeness, his neat, ideal little life had been easy to imitate. To allow that man to believe he was happy. That man had a hole in him and he was searching desperately for something to make it better. That man had forgotten what it felt like to be in pain and feared it. 

That man had died in Derry. Eddie Kasprak had left him in the dirty filth under Derry where it belonged, with the shame and the hate. He strangled the leper to death. 

“I can’t,” Eddie says. “And I’m not sorry.”

Nebraska has harsh winters, it turns out. Richie thought he’d be fine in his leather jacket and maybe a hoodie and then quickly realises he can’t bear being outside in just that and borrows one of Ben’s coats for the rest of the stay. In his last couple of weeks in LA he took an absurd point of pride in telling people,  _ no, I can’t have a meeting in person after the 17th. I’m flying out to Nebraska to spend Christmas with my family.  _

He has been having  _ meetings,  _ a word that fills him with horror, because he is refurbishing his life. They are mostly with Steve, who has latched onto Richie’s desire to change his image as a new and fascinating problem, and has what he calls a plan of action and what Richie calls a moodboard in his office. It is going to be a radical change. Richie has been going to table readings for dramatic parts, trying on roles. It might not get him cast in anything, but it is getting people -- including Richie himself -- to think of his dramatic range. They fired his ghostwriters. He won’t do standup for a little while; he can’t bring himself to start talking about anything personal in front of a crowd right now. He’s still working out what he wants people to know about him. 

Seven of them are at Ben’s house; Ben, of course, Beverly, Stan, Patty, Mike, Bill, and himself. The absence of his right hand is a potent absence, even in a house full of people. Ben lives in a giant four bedroom open-plan house of his own design. He can’t explain why he landed on the design he did, only that it felt correct, at the time.

“Four rooms isn’t enough,” Richie says, “you should have gone with six.”

“I’m fine sharing with Mike,” Bill says. “We, uh… He’s been staying at mine anyway.”

“Oh, cute, it’s like a sleepover,” Beverly says. “You can paint each other’s nails.”

Bill theatrically rolls his eyes at her. Mike laughs and ruffles his hair. 

“It’s probably a good thing Eddie isn’t coming,” Richie says. “I’d have to sleep on the couch or something to make room for him and his husband.”

“His husband isn’t invited,” Ben says mildly from the kitchen. 

They hadn’t talked much since the snow. No drama to it; they just quietly didn’t have the time for long calls. Sometimes you stopped talking to people. Now he is in Nebraska, where there has been twenty inches of snowfall, a far cry from LA. Ben insists that it’s not as bad as it got in Maine, but it’s bad enough for Richie. Despite this, he has spent a long time since he arrived patrolling Ben’s property, where the snow drifts are so deep they go up to his knees. His feet get so cold in his boots they go numb. It’s an entertainingly nostalgic sensation. He has a lifetime of memories he repressed about walking through the snow to school, the harsh winter winds, throwing powdery handfuls of snow at his friends. 

Out in the woods, the phone signal is shit. His first signal someone wants to talk to him is Mike waving at him from the balcony of Ben’s house, a smudge of bright Christmas sweater against the shiny glass front of the house. Richie trudges back through the snow towards him until he’s in shouting distance.

“Answer your phone,” Mike calls down to him.

“I was getting back to nature,” Richie says.

“Get back to nature in Ben’s house. He has enough plants here.”

Richie’s phone connects again when he’s close to the house. A missed call from Eddie appears and predictably, his heart leaps in his chest. He calls him back, fumbling with his bulky gloves. Eddie picks up immediately, and Richie can hear the loud hum of an engine in the background. 

“What’s up!” Richie says.  _ I wish you were here.  _

“Hey,” Eddie says. “Hey, we need to talk.”

“I didn’t do it.”

“You did. You’ve done it now, Richie.”

Richie laughs, a little nervously. He walks up the high steps that lead to Ben’s deck. Mike, leaning on the railing, hands him a cup of eggnog. Richie thinks eggnog is disgusting, but he appreciates having something warm to hold onto. Mike gives him an encouraging smile before he vanishes back into the house. Richie wonders vaguely if he  _ knows  _ something, though he isn’t sure what. Mike knows a lot of things. 

“What exactly have I done?” Richie says.

“I always thought I was really superior. I was married, I was successful, I wasn’t  _ like other gays.  _ I wasn’t anything my mother said might happen. I kept telling myself my life was perfect.”

“Ok. And?”

“It wasn’t. I didn’t know that until Derry. You don’t just come out once in your life, you know? And the most important person you come out to is yourself. I thought I was ok with myself, but I didn’t really ever accept who I was.”

Richie stands in the doorway to Ben’s house and stares out over the dark trees. He swallows hard. 

“Funny. I don’t think I would have come out at all if I didn’t know you,” he says.

“It goes both ways,” Eddie says. “I think, uh… Or, I hope that a lot of things do.”

“What are you saying?”

He walks into the house, stomping snow off his boots. Inside, Mike has gone to lie down on the couch next to Patty, who is trying to explain how to knit to Ben. Ben gives Richie a little wave and he feels suddenly insanely bashful, so he takes a few steps away to hide in the kitchen while he talks. He stares down a stainless steel bowl of fruit seated on the black countertop as Eddie continues. 

“I miss you. I miss all of you, but I miss you every day,” Eddie says. “You make me want to be a better person. You told me to be brave, and I want to be brave all the time. It’s not just about killing the clowns, it’s about things every day. Every day for the rest of your life.”

“Are you getting anywhere near a point anytime soon, Eds?”

“I’m getting really close to the point. That’s fucking stupid, that was a stupid thing to say.”

“I’m going to have a fucking breakdown if you don’t tell me what you mean.”

“Hang on.”

“Hang on?!”

There’s a sound as the car breaks. Richie hears the engine cut out, the door swinging open. In the hallway near him, Beverly’s giant fucking dog starts barking. Richie looks out through one of the floor to ceiling windows, out over the snowy landscape. In the small cluster of cars on Ben’s drive, there is a black escalade. The pace of Richie’s heart has started to pick up.

“What’s going on?” Beverly calls from somewhere in the house. 

Richie starts walking from the kitchen back to the front door, quickly, his boots loud on the wood. The others stare after him as he races to the door and then out into the bitter cold, where snow is blowing in off the branches of the trees. Out on the balcony he leans down and stares over at the drive. A man in a dark coat is exiting a large SUV and looking up at him.

“Thought you were staying with your husband’s family,” Richie says, the phone still pressed to his ear. It’s easier, somehow. The artifice of protection, maybe.

“Wanted to stay with my family,” Eddie says. “I have to tell you something.”

“I already know you’re gay.”

“I love you, Richie.”

“I know you do, I love you too.”

“You’re not listening to me.”

Richie starts walking down the stairs. Behind him, the others start coming out onto the balcony to watch. Bill starts waving at Eddie, but Eddie isn’t looking at him. Eddie is looking at Richie.

“You’ll have to show me what you mean,” Richie says. Eddie hangs up.

Eddie is walking towards him. Any second now they will collide. They are almost running across the snow towards each other, as much as they can, ungainly and awkward as they make their way through the thick layer of powder. Eddie is picking his knees up as high as he can, charging towards Richie, and Richie is seconds away from him. Richie reaches out. Eddie is coming into his arms, Richie’s hands are on his shoulders. Eddie’s hands are coming up to his face.

“Hey, you hung up on me,” Richie says.

“I found a new way to shut you up,” Eddie says. 

Richie has dreamed about kissing Eddie for longer than he can remember even now. It is better than that. He is glad, too, for the new chance to tell Eddie what he whispered to him leaving Neibolt. He hopes he can tell him again, and again, and again.

Summer in LA is something Eddie isn’t getting used to. Maybe it’s unkind, but Richie finds it hilarious. Eddie walks around their apartment in his underwear and complains on the weekends, which Richie can deal with. It’s only June, too. He has told Eddie it’s only going to get hotter, which made Eddie groan with misery like a wounded bull before falling onto the floor spread-eagled in front of the fan. He has started to freckle like a dalmatian. Richie adores it. 

LA’s pride parade is in June. It’s the first one Richie has ever gone to. He used to avoid them like a plague, as if his presence at one would cast aspersions on him. He doesn’t think he minds if people start talking now, after they see him at Pride with his arm around a man. In a way he’s almost amused anticipating what people will say, as the rumours that started up after paparazzi snagged photos of him and Eddie moving in gain more traction. 

“I see the point of Pride, I don’t know if I see the point of  _ parades _ ,” Eddie says as they approach the parade route.

“Do you want to sit on my shoulders so you can see over the crowd?” Richie says.

“Yeah, go on,” Eddie says. “Pick me up. I’ll be  _ so  _ angry if you pick me up. I would hate it.”

“That sounds like reverse psychology to me, Kaspbrak.”

There’s already a large crowd milling around the sidewalk, waiting for the parade to come past. Eddie’s hand is in Richie’s, but no one is really looking at them, in the middle of all the chaos around them. They are a small part of all of it.

“I did not think I would ever be caught dead at one of these,” Eddie says.

“Yeah, me neither,” Richie says. “Where are we meeting Bill and Mike? Or are the hets wimping out on us?”

Eddie’s eyebrows shoot up and Richie frowns.

“What?” He says.

“Ok, so, you know I read that thing about how a lot of the time, people who are LGBT are drawn together even before they come out, and then all come out later on in life?” Eddie says.

For a long moment, Richie stares at him as the pieces fall into place in his mind.

“Are you fucking kidding-” he starts, before the parade music starts to drown him out. 


End file.
